Year 2 Blog

Welcome to the blog for our Year 2 classes. The year group blogs are a great communication tool. Teachers will be posting news, photographs, details of homework, examples of work, and anything they wish to share with their pupils and parents. Please speak to your class teacher if you have any question, feedback or concerns.

Mrs Fernandes

Silver Class Teacher

Miss Spencer

Gold Class Teacher

The oldest children in our school are in year 2 and continue to develop their skills in all areas of the curriculum from their achievements in year 1. The learning is still taken from the National Curriculum Key Stage One Programmes of Study although staff are skilled in recognising where extra challenge is needed for high attaining pupils. Many of our children regularly achieve results beyond that expected of 7 year olds, particularly in reading, writing, maths and science. Children in year 2 enjoy greater responsibility for the wider school environment and help to organise the library, dining room, hall and music for the daily Meeting. Our Eco-Schools Ambassadors are also chosen from year 2 and support us all in striving to become a more sustainable school.

The vouchers have started to trickle in. Thank you very much for your contributions so far. I spoke to Sainsburys at London Colney today. You should be given the coloured, individual vouchers at staffed tills, but the “till receipt” type vouchers from the self-checkouts. If these are not dispensed at the self-checkout tills then you can ask an available assistant, or at customer services. Thank you for your support.

Some super wacky hairstyles in year 2 today! Well done for all the creative styles.

This week the children enjoyed learning more about the Great Fire of London. They have created a timeline of the events of 1666 and have begun to write these in chronological order.

In Science the children investigated how far a toy car moves on different surfaces. The children made predictions and discussed how the test would be fair. Next week they will write up the experiment and record the results before writing their own conclusions.

Have you heard about the missing chocolate cake?

Today we wrote instructions in our big writing session. We are still using the Tin Forest as a stimulus to inspire our writing. We talked about the layout for the instructions, use of bullet points and adverbs of time. The children have been looking at comprehension questions and discussing how best to answer these. We have also looked at how to add conjunctions to make more complex sentences. We have sent home an activity to practise this.

In maths we have been consolidating our knowledge of addition and subtraction methods and used these to solve problems involving money. The children found this tricky so please could you practise using coins to make different amounts. You might also play ‘shops’ where change was needed too.

We hope you found the reading meeting useful. The presentation has now been uploaded to the school web site.

A short workshop to support parents with listening to their child reading at home. The session will focus on developing comprehension skills and deepening inference and deduction skills. No need to book.

A short workshop to support parents with listening to their child reading at home. The session will focus on developing comprehension skills and deepening inference and deduction skills. No need to book

A short workshop to support parents with listening to their child reading at home. The session will focus on developing comprehension skills and deepening inference and deduction skills. There is no need to book.

Yes, it’s that’s time of year when Sainsbury’s start giving away the Active Kids vouchers. We collect these and, at the end of June, choose items from their Active Kids catalogue, to refresh and replenish our PE supplies. These are used for PE sessions and also outdoor, purposeful play at lunchtimes. This will be the only source of revenue for our PE equipment and every voucher goes towards getting better and newer kit for our children. The pupils at school love good PE lessons and, as we all want to give our children the best we can, it’s essential to keep our equipment in good condition – and also make sure that there is always enough for a whole class to use. The vouchers are also used to buy resources for the children in Reception who love spending time outside and need lots of good-quality equipment to do so.

This year we would love to replace our “shape mats”. As you can see from this picture, they are in a woeful state – “manky” was the word one year one girl used to describe them, and I have to agree. The children are posing showing how they feel about the mats now, and how they

would feel if they had some nice new mats! Needless to say, purchasing 36 of these requires a lot of vouchers – 12,210 to be precise. And if we did get enough for these, there are plenty of other things we could do with. As I have found out at home, it seems that you can never have too many balls of all shapes, sizes and toughness, for children! – as an example…

Whenever you are in Sainsbury’s, please could you ask for the vouchers and your children can take them to the box in the hall every morning. Please ask your relatives who don’t have a school to donate to to please keep them for us. Thank you very much for your support. It is very much appreciated.

In Maths we have solved multiplication and division problems using numbers lines (counting up and back) and groups of for sorting. Some of this has been sent as home learning. The children also need to practise taking away 1 digit from 2 digit numbers as this helps them with the higher level maths.

Writing this week was a riddle. The children compared a metal animal with a real one stating similarities and differences. They then used these ideas to write clues. There were some very creative ideas!

An investigation in Science to see how strong some different types of paper was carried out by the children. They had 4 types of paper to ‘pull apart’ and then group into weakest and strongest. We talked about how we might not have the same answer as others and how important this was. Some children began to include a conclusion in their investigation to say whether their prediction was correct and why / why not.

Topic this week was to compare 17th century life to present, with a special focus on the fire service. The children identified differences between past and present using: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPY-hr-8-M0 They then went on to describe what they would do in certain situations in 1666 compared to now, for example – if they wanted to write a diary entry and it was getting dark.

There are reading meetings for you to find out ways to help your child progress with their reading and this includes comprehension. Tuesday 6.00 pm / Thursday 2.30pm amd Friday 9.00am.

A final polite reminder that the doors are open for the children to enter the classroom at 8.50am and learning begins then.